Category Archives: Events

We are happy to announce that the 10th DBpedia Community Meeting will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. During the SEMANTiCS 2017, Sep 11-14, the DBpedia Community will get together on the 14th of September for the DBpedia Day.

What cool things do you do with DBpedia? Present your tools and datasets at the DBpedia Community Meeting. Please submit your proposal in our form.

If you can’t stand it till the end of the SEMANTiCS, you can already participate in the workshop “Two worlds, one goal: A Reliable Linked Data ecosystem for media” held by DBpedia and Wolters Kluwer on the 11th of September. This half-day workshop aims at exploring major topics for publishers and libraries from DBpedia’s and Wolters Kluwer’s perspective. Therefore, both communities will dive into core areas like Interlinking, Metadata and Data Quality and address challenges such as fundamental requirements when publishing data on the web. Did we spark your interest? Check our detailed program here and get your ticket today.

After our 2nd Community Meeting in the US, we delighted the Irish DBpedia Community with the 9th DBpedia Community Meeting, which was co-located with the Language, Data and Knowledge Conference 2017 in Galway at the premises of the NUI Galway.

First and foremost, we would like to thank John McCrae (Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUI Galway) and the LDK Conference for co-hosting and support the event.

The focus of this Community Meeting was the Irish DBpedia and Linked Data Community in Ireland. Therefore we invited local data scientists as well as European DBpedia enthusiasts to discuss the state of Irish Linked Data.

The meeting started with two compelling keynotes by Brian Ó Raghallaigh, Dublin City University and Logainm.ie, and Sharon Flynn, NUI Galway and Wikimedia Ireland. Brian presented Logainm.ie, a data use case about placenames in Ireland with a special focus on linked Logainm and machine-readable data.

Brian Ó Raghallaigh

His insightful presentation was followed by Sharon Flynn talking about Wikimedia in Ireland and the challenges of “this monumental undertaking” with particular reference to the Wikimedia Community in Ireland.

Sharon Flynn

For more details on the content of the presentations, follow the links to the slides.

Parallel sessions

As a regular part of the DBpedia Community Meeting we have two parallel sessions in the afternoon where DBpedia newbies can learn about what DBpedia is and how to use the DBpedia data sets.

Markus Freudenberg giving a DBpedia Tutorial

Participants who wanted to learn DBpedia basics joined the DBpedia Tutorial Session byMarkus Freudenberg (DBpedia Release Manager). The DBpedia Association Hour provided a platform for the community to discuss and give feedback.

Sebastian Hellman and Julia Holze @ the DBpedia Association Hour

Additionally, Sebastian Hellmann and Julia Holze, members of the DBpedia Association, updated the participants about the growing number of the DBpedia Association members, the formalized DBpedia language chapters, the established DBpedia Community Committee and they informed about technical developments such as the DBpedia API.

At this point, we also like to thank the ALIGNED project for the development ofDBpedia as a project use case and for covering parts of the travel cost.

Session about Irish Linked Data Projects

Chaired by Rob Brennan and Bianca Pereira, the speakers in the last session presented new Irish Linked Data Projects, for example GeoHive, BIOOPENER and the TCD Open Linked Data Engagement Fund Project. The following panel session gave DBpedia and Linked Data enthusiasts a platform for exchange and discussion. Outcome of this session was the creation of a roadmap for the Irish Linked Data with all participants.

Closing this session John McCrae announced that the next edition of the Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK) Conference is scheduled for 2019 in Germany. We at the DBpedia Association are now looking forward to welcome the LDK Community in Leipzig!

Social Evening Event

The Community Meeting slowly came to an end with our social evening event, which was held at the PorterShed in Galway. The evening session revolved around the topic How to exploit data commercially? and featured two short impulse talks. Paul Buitelaar started the session by presenting “Kibi”, which is an Open Source platform for Data Intelligence based on the search engine Elasticsearch. Finally, Sebastian Hellmann talked about “Improving the Utility of DBpedia by co-designing a public and commercial DBpedia API” (slides).

Summing up, the 9th DBpedia Community Meeting brought together more than 45 DBpedia enthusiasts from Ireland and Europe who engaged in vital discussions about Linked Data, DBpedia use cases and services.

Thanks Ireland and hello Amsterdam!

We are looking forward to the next DBpedia Community Meeting which will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Co-located with the SEMANTiCS17, the Community will get together on the 14th of September on the DBpedia Day.

We are happy to announce that the 9th DBpedia Community meeting will be held in Galway, Ireland on June 21st 2017. DBpedia will be part of the Language, Data and Knowledge conference (LDK) in Galway. This new biennial conference series aims at bringing together researchers from across disciplines. The DBpedia Meeting is part of the conference and is scheduled for the last day.

Only few seats are left: So come and get your ticket to be part of the 9th DBpedia Community meeting in Galway.

The social event will be held in the evening (starting at 6pm) at the PorterShed around the topic How to exploit data commercially? featuring several short impulse talks. We still have some remaining slots and would welcome you to present your success stories as well as use cases, but also tell us about your problems regarding the commercialisation of data. If you are interested in presenting, please email dbpedia@infai.org.

DBpedia will participate for a fifth time in the Google Summer of Code program (GSoC) and now we are looking for students who will share their ideas with us. We are regularly growing our community through GSoC and can deliver more and more opportunities to you. We got excited with our new ideas, we hope you will get excited too!

What is GSoC?

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Funds will given to students (BSc, MSc, PhD) to work for three months on a specific task. At first open source organizations announce their student projects and then students should contact the mentor organizations they want to work with and write up a project proposal for the summer. After a selection phase, students are matched with a specific project and a set of mentors to work on the project during the summer.

As previous years, we would like your input for DBpedia related project ideas for GSoC 2017.

For those who are unfamiliar with GSoC (Google Summer of Code), Google pays students (BSc, MSc, PhD) to work for 3 months on an open source project. Open source organizations announce their student projects and students apply for projects they like. After a selection phase, students are matched with a specific project and a set of mentors to work on the project during the summer.

After our successful meeting in Poznan in 2015, we thought it is time to meet the Polish DBpedia community again. The DBpedia meetup will be held on 22th of November 2016 at the Poznań University of Economics and Business. This meetup aims at the presentation of semantic web technologies and their use in applications by entrepreneurs.

After the largest DBpedia meeting to date we decided it was time to cross the Atlantic for the second time for another meetup. Two weeks ago the 8th DBpedia Community Meeting was held in Sunnyvale, California on October 27th 2016.

Main Event

Pablo Mendes from Lattice Data Inc. opened the main event with a short introduction setting the tone for the evening. After that Dimitris Kontokostas gave technical and organizational DBpedia updates. The main event attracted attendees with lightning talks from major companies actively using DBpedia or interested in knowledge graphs in general.

Four major institutions described their efforts to organize reusable information in a centralized knowledge representation. Google’s Tatiana Libman presented (on behalf of Denny Vrandečić) the impressive scale of the Google Knowledge graph, with 1B+ entities and over 100 billion facts.

Tatiana Libman from Google

Yahoo’s Nicolas Torzec presented the Yahoo knowledge graph, with focus on their research on extracting data from Web tables to expand their knowledge which includes DBpedia as an important part. Qi He from LinkedIn focused mostly on how to model a knowledge graph of people and skills, which becomes particularly interesting with the possibility of integration with Microsoft’s Satori Graph. Such an integration would allow general domain knowledge and very specific knowledge about professionals complementing one another. Stas Malyshev from Wikidata presented statistics on their growth, points of contact with DBpedia as well as an impressive SPARQL query interface that can be used to query the structured data that they are generating.

Three other speakers focused on the impact of DBpedia in machine learning and natural language processing. Daniel Gruhl from IBM Watson gave the talk “Truth for the impatient” where he showed that a knowledge model built from DBpedia can help costs and time to value for extracting entity mentions with higher accuracy. Pablo Mendes from Lattice Data Inc. presented their approach that leverages DBpedia and other structured information sources for weak supervision to obtain very strong NLP extractors. Sujan Perera from IBM Watson discussed the problem of identifying implicit mentions of entities in tweets and how the knowledge represented in DBpedia can be used to help uncover those references.

Another three speakers focused on applications of DBpedia and knowledge graphs. Margaret Warren from Metadata Authoring Systems, LLC presented ImageSnippets and how background knowledge from DBpedia allows better multimedia search through inference. For instance, by searching for “birds” you may find pictures that haven’t been explicitly tagged as birds but for which the fact can be inferred from DBpedia. Jans Aasman from Franz Inc presented their company’s approach to Data Exploration with Visual SPARQL Queries. They described opportunities for graph analytics in the medical domain, and discussed how DBpedia has been useful in their applications. Finally, Wang-Chiew Tan presented their research at RIT relating to building chatbots, among other projects that relate to using background knowledge stored in computers to enrich real life experiences.

Nicolas Torzec from Yahoo

Overall the talks were very high quality and fostered plenty of discussions afterwards. We finalized the event with a round of introductions where every attendee got to say their name and affiliation to help them connect with one another throughout the final hour of the event.

All slides and presentations are also available on ourWebsite and you will find more feedback and photos about the event on Twitter via #DBpediaCA.

Less than 24 hours left to reserve your seat for our 2nd US DBpedia Community meeting. The meeting will be held in Sunnyvale on October 27th 2016, hosted by Yahoo. Over 85 participants registered so far, we will offer 20 more tickets. So come and get your ticket to be part of this event.

The event will feature talks from Yahoo, IBM Watson, LinkedIn, Lattice, Wikimedia, Frank Inc, Knoesis, RIT and ImageSnippets. The topics will include knowledge graphs & machine learning, open data, open source and startups. Please read below on different ways you can participate. We are looking forward to meeting again in person with the US-based DBpedia community.

Very shortly after the largest DBpedia meeting to date we are crossing Atlantic for the second time. We are happy to announce that the 8th DBpedia Community Meeting will be held in Sunnyvale on October 27th 2016, hosted by Yahoo.

The event will feature talks from Yahoo, IBM Watson, LinkedIn and Lattice amongst others. The topics will include knowledge graphs & machine learning, open data, open source and startups.

Please read below on different ways you can participate. We are looking forward to meeting again in person with the US-based DBpedia community.

Attending the DBpedia Community meeting is free of charge, but seats are limited. Make sure to register to reserve a seat.

Call for Contribution

Please submit your proposal through our form. Contribution proposals may include (but are not limited to) presentations, demos, lightning talks, panels and session suggestions. We intend to accept as many proposals as possible in the available meeting time.

Location

The meeting will take place at the Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale. Address: Yahoo! (Building E, 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA)

After the success of the last two community meetings in Palo Alto and in The Hague we thought it is time to meet in Leipzig, where the DBpedia Association is located. During the SEMANTiCS 2016 in Leipzig, Sep 12-15, the DBpedia community met on the 15th of September. First and foremost, we would like to thank the Institute for Applied Informatics for supporting our community, the University of Leipzig for hosting our meeting and many thanks to the SEMANTiCS for hosting and sponsoring the meeting.

Opening Session

DBpedia Team and Lydia Pintscher (Wikidata)

During the opening session, Lydia Pintscher, product manager of Wikidata, presented Wikidata: bringing structured data to Wikipedia with 16000 volunteers. Lydia described similarities and varieties between DBpedia and Wikidata and she talked about prospective steps for Wikidata. Harald Sack from the Hasso-Plattner-Institut spoke during the opening session, too. He introduced the dwerft Project – DBpedia and Linked Data for the Media Value Chaintopics which aims the common technology platform »Linked Production Data Cloud«.

Showcase Session

The DBpedia showcase session started with the DBpedia 2016-04 release update by Markus Freudenberg (AKSW/KILT). At this session, six speakers presented how to utilize DBpedia in novel and interesting ways. For example:

Jörn Hees (DFKI) introduced us to Human associations in the Semantic Web and DBpedia.

Peter de Laat from GoUnitive urged the community to personalize user interaction in a Linked Data environment.

DBpedia Association hour

The 7th edition of the community meeting covered the first DBpedia Association hour, which provided a platform for the community to discuss and give feedback. Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW, KILT), Julia Holze (DBpedia Association) and Dimitris Kontokostas (AKSW, KILT) gave an update on the DBpedia Association status. We talked about our technical progress, DBpedia funding and visions. Sebastian Hellmann introduced the Board of Trustees, which is the main decision-making body of the DBpedia Association and oversees the association and its work as its ultimate corporate authority.

Enno Meijers (KB) of the Dutch DBpedia chapter announced a successful cooperation between Huygens ING, iMinds/Univ. Gent, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Institute for Sound and Vision, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) and the NL-DBpedia community. By signing the Manifest of Understanding (MoU) they support the goals of the DBpedia Association officially and strengthen the Dutch chapter and community.

The sessions in the afternoon highlighted two important fields of research and development, namely DBpedia ontology and DBpedia & NLP. At the DBpedia ontology session, Wouter Maroy (iMinds) presented DBpedia RML mappings, which he created during this year’s Google Summer of Code project and Gerard Kuys (Ordina) discussed the question ‘Does extraction prelude structure?’ with the DBpedia ontology group. At the same time, Milan Dojchinovski (AKSW/KILT) chaired the DBpedia & NLP session with eight very interesting talks. You will find all presentations given during this session on our website. The last two presentations Analyzing and improving the Polish Wikipedia Citations (part of the Wikipedia References & Citations challenge) and Greek DBpedia updates were given by Krzysztof Węcel (Poznan University) and Sotiris Karampatakis (OKF Greece).

On the closing session we wrapped up the meeting and gave out our prizes to:

The “DBpedia Excellence in Engineering” went to Markus Freudenberg for keeping up with the DBpedia releases

The “Citations Challenge prize” went to Krzysztof Węcel for his very thorough citation analysis.

All slides and presentations are also available on our Website and you will find more feedback and photos about the event on Twitter via #DBpediaLeipzig2016.

Summing up, the event brought together more than 150 DBpedians from Europe which engaged in vital conversations about interesting projects and approaches to questions/problems revolving around DBpedia. We would like to thank the organizers Magnus Knuth (HPI, DBpedia German & Commons), Monika Solanki (University of Oxford) and representatives of the DBpedia Association such as Dimitris Kontokostas, Sebastian Hellmann and Julia Holze for devoting their time to the organization of the meeting and the program.

We are now looking forward to the 8th DBpedia Community Meeting (which most probably coming sooner than you think across the Atlantic). Check our website for further updates or follow #DBpedia on twitter.